


cancer boy & one leg

by jflawless



Category: GOT7
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cancer, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-02-22 17:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2516363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jflawless/pseuds/jflawless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jackson's life falls apart with one weakened bone, but it also leads him to Mark Tuan, a wonderful boy who's lungs are trying to kill him, so maybe it really wasn't so bad after all. </p><p>aka the cancer au</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the summary is literally so trash i hate writing summaries i usually just use a portion of the fic but i can't do that with a multi chapter so i'm sorry. 
> 
> originally posted on jacksnwangs.tumblr.com and written with bngsyongguk.tumblr.com

Jackson ignores the sharp shot of pain traveling through his left shin, carefully holding his focus on the dummy in front of him. He dances forward and back, practicing the complicated movements his dad had showed him a couple hours earlier. After another twenty minutes, that sharp pain fades into a dull ache that Jackson immediately calls as shin splits. He’s no stranger to shin splits, a common ailment when you’re the best fencer in all of Asia.    

Technically, he hasn’t won that title yet, but with the way his form is improving through hours of practice as he prepares for the upcoming Youth Olympics, he’s pretty sure he’s got it in the bag. By the end of his practice, the pain has melted away completely and Jackson forgets it ever even hurt.

Until, three nights later, when it returns fiercely. It’s an ache that no amount of stretching, icing, massaging or crying can cure, deep in his bone.  Jackson lays awake the entire night, biting his tongue and praying it disappears before he gets up for practice.

It does, luckily, just as the morning light starts to filter through Jackson’s curtain, granting him a full half hour of sleep before his alarm startles him awake for his before school work out.  He takes more time than usual for his pre-run stretches, still citing shin splits as the cause of his horrible night. Post run, he takes longer than necessary to ice his legs, leaving them in long after they’ve gone numb, trying to eradicate the splint before it can grow into anything dangerous.

For an entire month, his shin bothers him only during particularly heavy practices or at the tail end of long runs.  Jackson learns to live with it, finds if he applies less pressure on his left foot and takes most of his weight on his right instead, the pain eases enough for him to at least complete his workout.

Until, it gets worse. The more he gets used to the aching in his bones, the more painful it becomes.  The second he thinks maybe it’s gone; it tears back through his leg, angrier than ever.  It starts to hurt more days than it doesn’t, keeping him up for days on end as he lays in bed, entire body throbbing with the agony of it.

Jackson doesn’t tell anyone, keeping the pain to himself for three months, even after it becomes a consistent bother, worse during practice and night but always  _there_. His dad would make him stop practice, tell him he can’t compete in the games, and Jackson’s not giving that up. It  _hurts._ It hurts so badly Jackson can’t even find the words to explain it; there’s no ailment he knows painful enough to compare it to, but Jackson’s drive to compete too strong. He wants it too badly to give it up for a bad leg. As long as he’s got both, he’s going to the tournament, he’s going to fence and he’s going to _win_.

He doesn’t even tell his dad on the way to the hospital, partially because he’s curled up in the back, leg pulled tight against his chest while he screams, partially because he knows his dad will be angry he didn’t take it easy when he was already injured. Jackson had been practicing, just like every other day, doing the same footwork he’d nearly perfected years earlier. He didn’t know exactly what happened, everything falling apart so quickly while intense pain made him too dizzy to think clearly, but there was a snap or a crack or some awful noise that made Jackson sick to his stomach. That’s about where the screaming started, both of Jackson’s parents falling over each other to get down the stairs to their son. They found him where he landed on the floor, cradling his awkwardly bent leg and screeching through his misery, having just barely missed falling into a pile of his own vomit.

Immediately, they pulled him up and tried to carry him to the car without agitating his leg, trying to get him to calm down enough to explain what happened. They were, ultimately, unsuccessful, as Jackson continued to scream even once his voice was horse and tears were streaming down his face. 

Around then, everything gets even hazier. Jackson is pretty sure he passed out, or it’s when they sedated him at the hospital, but either way he wakes up lightheaded with a heavy weight on his leg, the sharp pain that’s been plaguing him for weeks replaced with a quiet throb. The words painkillers and break and bed rest are thrown at him in the midst of a lot of medical jargon he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t understand even if he wasn’t exhausted and a little high. 

He stays for three nights, which seems like a long time for such a simple bone break but he’s so happy to be officially out of bed he doesn’t really question it. Mostly he’s worried about the slim period between when his cast should come off and the start of the tournament. His dad won’t say much beyond “don’t you dare try and practice”.

Jackson, of course, ignores him.  It’s hard to time, his parents there to usher him onto the couch or into bed when he arrives home, taking breaks from whispering outside his door to offer to retrieve him anything he wants.  Every night he sets an alarm and every morning he wakes up three hours late, just in time for breakfast before his mom drives him to school. A couple days in the first week he thinks he sees her crying but his painkillers are pretty strong so he writes it off both times.

Eventually though, almost two full weeks after he’s left the hospital, he finds a minor window where his mom is still at work and his dad has sped off to the store with his request for more ice cream. Waiting at the window until his father’s car pulls fully out of the drive, he moves as quickly as his thick cast will allow into the basement to attempt footwork with the extra weight. It’s hard and it makes his leg ache far more than it should with the painkillers, but, as long as he has both legs, he’s going to fence.

Between the intense focus he puts into all his practices and the way the slowly increasing pain burning through his shin is making him lightheaded, it’s no surprise that Jackson doesn’t hear his dad returning, or calling out his name, or running down the stairs to catch him with his saber in hand, hobbling towards the dummy in a sad imitation of his light, quick footwork. Immediately his dad rounds on him, angrier than Jackson can ever remember him being. He’s yelling about conditions and weak bones, all while knocking off Jackson’s gear and pushing him into the nearest seat. Jackson doesn’t follow a lot, but he catches the word ‘cancer’ somewhere among the tirade and holds his hands up in surrender.

“What did you just say?” He asks, his father’s face shifting from the bright, angry red to fearfully pale as soon as the question leaves his mouth.

“Listen, son, we thought it was for the best if you didn’t know,” he tries, but Jackson cuts in, voice low and dangerous, a tone he’d never dreamed of taking with someone he respected as much as his dad.

“ _What did you say?”_

“While we were in the hospital, when you broke your leg, they took and x-ray and they found something odd, so they took a lot of tests while you were sedated and we found out you have cancer, in your bones, two of them, in your leg,” Jackson’s dad explains in a rush. Once again, Jackson interrupts before he can finish his explanation.

“I have  _cancer?_  In my  _leg?_  And you thought you could just fucking keep it to yourself?”

“We were going to tell you.”

“When? When were you going to tell me? After they stuck in the needle for chemo? After they cut off my fucking leg? After I’d already fucking  _died?_  Just stop by the grave, mention it then, ‘hey, son, just wanted you to know, you had cancer. Ruined your bones. Broke your leg.  _Killed you_.’? Write me a nice little note in my fucking obituary?”

“When we took you to the hospital, Jackson, listen, it’s  _a lot_  to process. We wanted to wait until you were going to get treated so you wouldn’t have time to spend worrying before it was taken care of. You’re not going to lose your leg, we’ve found the  _best_ cancer hospital and  _all_ the doctors we’ve spoken to have  _promised_  that they will do anything to save the leg. They’re all confident they can complete the surgery to remove the cancer from the bone and get you back up into perfect fencing form within the year.”

“The year? The  _year?_ The competition is in  _two months_. I don’t have a  _year_.”

“Jackson!” His dad returns with strength, yelling over Jackson’s furious rambling about training and winning and being the best, “A tournament doesn’t  _matter_  when you have  _cancer_ , I don’t fucking  _care_  about sports when my  _son_  has  _cancer_. If we don’t take care of this you could  _die_. Who fucking cares if you don’t get to make it to this one tournament as long as you  _live_?” Jackson falls silent, still quietly furious about what’s happening to him and how it was handled while his mind refuses to process the information.  It all sounds like something happening to someone else. Not him.  _He_ doesn’t have cancer. Some other poor bastard is having this conversation with  _his_  dad. Not Jackson. Not Jackson Wang, soon to be champion fencer.

It  _is_  happening to Jackson, though. It’s happening when his dad takes him upstairs to get him into bed so he can have more whispered conversations with his wife. It’s happening when no one wakes him up for school the next morning. It’s happening when no one wakes him up for school all week. It’s happening when his mom  _does_ wake him up, early, a week and four days after near constant bed rest with a duffel bag, three plane tickets and tears in her eyes. It’s happening when he boards the plane with a heavy cast, the only thing protecting the weak bone that’s been eaten away by the cancer that has grown inside  _him._ It’s happening to him when they check into a renowned children’s cancer hospital in the middle of fucking  _America_.

It’s happening when too many doctors to remember by name come shuffling in and out of Jackson’s hospital room, every single one speaking in rapid fire English, using words Jackson doesn’t have the capacity to understand because this  _isn’t happening to him._

Except, it is.

It is when they talk about options and treatments, facing Jackson but, really, asking his parents. It still is when they give him shots that make him sick and pills that made him sleep.

It’s still happening to him when a solemn voice says, “It’s time for surgery, Mr. Wang.”

Jackson says nothing, the same way he’s said nothing since the second his dad told him a sport meant nothing when his life was at stake. He uses no words but when his nurse leans close and makes a soft promise that his leg will remain attached, in fancier words that Jackson has no business trying to repeat, optimism floods his body and burns through his veins, sparking a wide grin that she can’t help but return.

When he wakes up, god knows how long later, the memory of the trip down the hall to the operating room hazier than the day he broke his leg, he can  _feel_ it. He can feel that quiet ache right in his shin that’s plagued him for weeks and that optimism explodes into ecstasy because she was  _right._ His hand reaches out, before he even opens his eyes, for his thigh. His strong thigh that he’s been slowly building up for  _years,_ expertly toning and working to near perfection. He can feel it through the thick wool blanket they’ve covered him with, just below his hip. Sitting up in small increments, Jackson reaches his hand further and further until, halfway down his thigh, it drops. His palm hits the mattress. He slides it even further, where his knee should be, where that stupid fucking shin should be, almost folding over entirely to touch all the way to the metal bar the marks the end of his bed.

He slides his hand frantically across the mattress, feeling nothing until it smacks into his right leg. Just to be sure, he brings up his other hand, grasping hopefully at the air beyond his right leg, like maybe he’s just too tired or maybe they’ve just put it on the other side as a joke. He squeezes his eyes shut even tighter, prays to every god he’s ever heard of, wishes on every star in existence, pretends it’s his birthday and blows out imaginary candles while begging and hoping that this was all just a strange dream or a morphine induced hallucination.

When he opens them, he sees his right leg, stretched out, creating a long lump underneath the soft blue blanket. He sees his hospital gown, decorated in ostentatious race cars where his covers have puddled in his lap, leaving his chest uncovered. He sees a small bump where his left thigh begins and the blanket spread flat over the rest of his mattress where the remainder of his left leg should’ve been.

The sudden burst of noise from down the hall is so jarring, Mark might’ve screamed if last night’s dinner wasn’t currently exiting his body, forced out by the poison dripping in his veins to fight the poison growing in his lungs. The horrified scream turns into furious screeching unexpectedly, the high pitched sounds becoming words that Mark can barely understand until he gets the chance to lift his head out of the toilet.

“YOU FUCKING PROMISED. YOU ASSHOLES  _PROMISED_  ME. GIVE IT BACK. GIVE ME BACK MY FUCKING LEG. YOU CAN’T DO THIS. YOU CAN NOT DO THIS TO ME. IT’S  _MINE_. PUT IT BACK. CANCER AND ALL JUST  _PLEASE_ FUCKING  _GIVE IT BACK TO ME_ ,” the shouting is cut off so suddenly Mark thinks they must have sedated the angry, one legged boy. Or, he just can’t hear it anymore because his dry heaving is so loud, his empty stomach trying to remove contents that aren’t there anymore.

His nurse rubs slow circles against his bare back, offering a glass of water. Grateful, Mark takes a long gulp.

The shouting has resumed, the same phrase over and over again, the occasional syllable lost in a heart wrenching sob. Just before his body rejects the drink and he has to duck his head back over to toilet to avoid spitting up on his pajama pants, he manages a weak laugh and tells his nurse, “At least I’m not that guy.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took literally four months chapter 3 will Probably be out before june

Mark doesn’t hear the angry new patient again after that initial outburst, but he does hear _about_ him. The day after his chemo, a small group of seven to nine year olds surround his bed after dinner, as they do every week, to keep him company while he feels too drained to even sit up. This week, they skip the usual picture books and anecdotes about their own treatments to whisper about the scary new boy. Anthony says that he’s got the room next to him and the yelling woke him up from his nap and that the nurses had to sedate his neighbor to get him to finally calm down. He adds that the boy has refused to speak since the incident, ignoring all three of Anthony’s friendly greetings.  Mimi cuts in to explain that she noticed him _weeks_ ago, because, Mark, he is _so cute_. She whines about how he didn’t smile once all day, not after they took off his leg, but he did that day he saw her crying after her hair fell out, promising her she looked beautiful without it. Kai chimes in, helpfully, to say that the new guy didn’t eat at all and that the nurses were getting really upset about it by dinner. Mimi whines even louder about how her future husband is going to starve to death, but Mark manages to calm her by tapping one of his IVs and reminding her that patients are fed whether or not they want to be.

He’s not sure how much stock to put into any of the stories, because Anthony has always been convinced that the doctors are a little trigger happy with the sedatives and thinks that everyone is sedated most of the time, and Mimi tells him that every single boy and girl who comes through the ward is _so cute_ , and she wants to marry almost anyone that’s at least a foot taller than she is, especially the ones who tell her she’s beautiful when she doesn’t believe she is, and Kai doesn’t believe anything they can’t see, so if they’ve never seen the one legged boy eat, they would think he never has before. Mark’s still pretty sure all their stories are at least rooted in truth, because while they’re all more imaginative than Mark can ever remember being and never one hundred percent sure what’s going on with them or around them, they’re all good kids, and none of them are liars. They’re all, Mark included, a little bored and a little restless, but so far, no one’s resorted to making up stories just to pass the time or rile each other up.

Right on time, just as she does week after week, Mark’s nurse bounds in to break up the small congregation of children and send them out on their way, to sleep, or get their own treatments, or for an after dinner treat on nights when Mimi tries to refuse to go, so that Mark can get his IV changed and his vitals checked and rest. He adores the kids, really, and it’s not as if he has much else to do, but having cancer is kind of constantly exhausting so he appreciates having their visits cut short without being the one to tell them to go.

It’s a few more days before he’s ready to get out of bed and back to his usual pastime of aimlessly wandering the halls and occasionally stopping at the coloring table in the one communal room on the floor, littered with donated toys and sick kids and parents who are pretending like they aren’t using all their energy to hold in their tears. Mark’s the oldest patient on the floor, as far as he knows, a few weeks past his seventeenth birthday. He could probably be transferred to an adult hospital, if he wanted, but he’s so familiar with the nurses and doctors who have been treating him since he was five that he can’t imagine meeting a new one, especially when he’s pretty sure he’ll never see eighteen. Besides, it’s probably more fun hanging out with people ten years younger than you than it would be hanging out with people ten years older.

On his first time venturing out of his room for the week, Mark sees a boy who he can confidently assume is the new patient all the kids were up in arms about, considering Mark’s never seen him before and he’s, you know, missing most of a leg. He isn’t wearing the usual hospital pajamas, but instead a baggy pair of shorts that show off one muscled, tanned leg and hang uselessly on the other side, and an even baggier jersey with ugly lettering that spells out “WANG” across his chest. It’s still early, not even seven in the morning, so most of the kids are still asleep, or at least, still in their rooms. There are a few tired nurses milling around, filling out paperwork, arranging medication, waiting for the morning shift to come relieve them of their positions. Mark sees a couple doctors wander past him, but none he knows that well. After not getting out of bed for four days, he tossed around, restless and with more energy that he’s used to having, before finally getting up to go on a walk around the floor. 

The new patient is in a wheelchair, sitting as close to one of the large, plush loungers as he can. Mark stops near the edge of the bright purple carpet that separates the waiting room from the rest of the hospital, giving it a much nicer feel than the stark white walls and cold tile flooring that make up the rest of the rooms. He doesn't think the new boy notices him, even when he grunts softly as his oxygen tank bumps into the backs of his legs, the low friction wheels continuing to roll behind him even after he comes to a stop. He's just staring forward, eyes unfocused, mouth drawn into a scowl.

Mark watches him for a few minutes, but the entire time he just sits and scowls and stares. Mark supposes there's not much else to do, really, when you find out you have cancer and you lost your leg and you're nothing but mad about it. He's sure he could be found in the same position, occasionally, when it gets too hard to be lighthearted about his situation and the gravity of his impending death pulls him down to earth and all he can think about is all the things that cancer has robbed from him and all the things that he will never get to do.

The boy finally looks up when Mark starts to hobble over towards the seat next to the wheelchair, his small, portable tank a lot less portable when he's trying to drag it through a shag carpet, and Mark looks up from where he's trying to get one wheel uncaught just in time to see the scowl fade into a look of shock, the new patient reaching forward like maybe he's going to help, until he remembers his predicament and falls heavily back and the scowl returns just as quickly as it left. Mark manages, after a couple minutes of struggle that leave him lightheaded, chest heaving, lungs begging for air they are not strong enough to pull in, to get himself into the chair.

He stares ahead for a long moment, fiddling with his cannula until it doesn't feel so much like he's going to collapse and the spots where his vision was going dark return to normal. When he feels stable again, he carefully maneuvers himself in the chair until he is facing the new patient and there are no tubes tangled anywhere.

"I'm Mark," he tells the boy, who does not look at him. Mark waits for him to get a return introduction, but it never comes. They stay in silence, Mark looking at him, him staring at the table six feet ahead of them.

"Thanks for helping Mimi," Mark says eventually, because he's not sure what else to say but he knows how lonely the hospital can be, especially at six fifty eight in the morning when things are calm and quiet and there is nothing to distract you from your thoughts, and Mimi is his favorite and he hates when she's sad. "She said that you told her she was pretty after her hair fell out. She said you're very cute, and that she wants to marry you," the other boy’s lips quirk into the smallest of smiles, one that doesn't last long, but while it's there, Mark thinks that Mimi was right. He starts to say something else, but he's interrupted by a semi-frantic morning shift nurse swinging around the corner and surprising both of them when she grabs the handles of new boy's wheelchair.

"I was worried when you weren't in your room!" She says, and new boy doesn't react to her anymore than he reacted to Mark, which makes him feel a little better. At least it's not _just_ him, "We've got to change your dressing!" She offers Mark a quick apology for taking away his friend and Mark bites his tongue to hold in a joke about him not being great company anyways, swallowing the words, 'I doubt I'll even notice a difference', and instead waves a vague assent.

As new boy is being wheeled away, Mark watches them go, and he feels the need to say goodbye, or something, some sort of final acknowledgement. He's not really sure why, but there's this sudden surge of impulsive energy that has him leaning around the back of the chair to call after them. When he opens his mouth, 'goodbye' is _not_ what comes out, nor is 'It was nice to meet you', two valid and fitting farewells, but instead, he says, "Sorry about your leg!"

That night, Mark finds new boy again, in the same exact spot he met him the first time, only this time he is scowling towards the window and there are seven kids milling around and playing quietly, all of them throwing worried glances towards the unfamiliar patient whenever someone gets a little too loud, as if they are trying to be calm exclusively for his sake. It never gets particularly rowdy, considering few of the patients really have it in them to ever get rowdy, but it's still the quietest Mark has ever witnessed the floor being after dinner.

It’s just as much of a struggle for Mark to get his tank across the carpet as it always is and not for the first time, he thinks that the people designing a cancer ward waiting room could have maybe considered the people with cancer who would be using it, but it’s a little easier because as soon as the younger kids notice him, they descend upon him to help him drag the small tank over the same chair he spent most of his morning in. He’d stayed there for a long time after wheelchair boy left, too exhausted by his first trek to make it again until his main doctor wandered past and helped him back onto the smooth floors that allowed him to easily drag both himself and his life line back to his room where he promptly napped until they woke him up to eat, and kind of hoping new boy might come back to sit silently next to him. He settles in, far less out of breath than he had been the first time, and he begins to ramble at the boy who won’t acknowledge that he’s speaking, telling all his favorite stories about the kids he’s watching play and a few who the new boy will never get to meet. Thankfully, most of the ones he mentions were lucky, and their treatments worked and they’d yet to be back, but there’s a couple he speaks of that passed away in the years that Mark had been watching kid after kid pass through while he continued to feel better and worse but rarely healthy enough to leave. Even though it’s been years and Mark has known too many people who’ve died, it’s still tasking to try to keep the sadness from his voice. The boy never looks away from whatever he’s staring at through the window, if anything, but by the time Mark pushes himself out of the chair to trudge back to his room a few yards down the hall, he doesn’t look unhappy. He doesn’t look particularly happy either, but Mark still considers it a success and feels a little surge of pride for himself.

It’s another two days before Mark sees him again, and this time, Mark talks to him about baseball. He doesn’t know all that much about baseball himself, but he’s been having a few bad days, health wise. His brother turned it on when he came to visit and it was still on when he left, and Mark had been far too fatigued to move enough to find the remote and change the channel and he’s seen three games since, so he feels like he’s got a pretty good understanding of the game. He knows the names enough players from two different teams to at least pretend like he really knows what he’s talking about, and new boy _seems_ to perk up when Mark brings up sports, if you consider turning his head so he’s looking more in Mark’s direction that he has before, and Mark does. A full hour of straight up bullshitting passes before someone comes to take new boy back to his room, for some check up or treatment or something, and Mark thinks about telling new boy that he has chemo the next day, and he probably won’t get to talk to him, but when the guy doesn’t even _look_ at Mark as the nurse takes him away, Mark figures he probably won’t care very much.  

Mark is pretty sure he’s right when an entire week goes by without him seeing the newest patient, and when they finally do meet, he still doesn’t acknowledge Mark. Mark had kind of hoped that wheelchair boy might have missed him, or something, or maybe stopped by his room, but he knew both were unlikely. He’s pretty sure new boy doesn’t even like him at all.

Still, despite his insecurities, he sits down in the same chair and tries not to feel too bad when new boy doesn’t say anything or give him more than a sideways glance. He doesn’t get upset when he asks for his name, because calling him “new boy” in his head is getting kind of exhausting, and there are enough things exhausting Mark without having to worry about this stupid kid in his stupid wheelchair, and he still doesn’t get it. He’s not sure exactly how old wheelchair kid is, but judging by appearances, he’s _at least_ fifteen, and that the closest anyone in the ward has been to mark in age since he was 11 years older and Ashley Cavry, exactly one year older than him, joined them when she was diagnosed with a rare case of small cell lung cancer, likely caused by her heavy exposure to second hand smoke throughout her entire childhood due to two chain-smoking parents. It spread quickly to everywhere it could reach and she didn’t stay long. For every ounce of adoration Mark has for the young kids on the floor, all but three of them ten years younger than him, and the other three nearly that, there is an equal amount of _want_ for someone his own age, or at least _close_. Mark’s been in and out of the hospital for so long, his stays longer than his leaves; he never had time to make friends. The only socialization he gets is with actual children, and as fun as they are, Mark wants something _more_. And this kid is his _chance_.

It’s not entirely selfish, either. Mark watches this poor fucking kid, the well defined muscles in his surviving leg and arms that of an athlete, staring out the window, doing _nothing_ , like his entire world has ended, like there’s nothing left worth doing, and Mark _gets_ it. Mark’s been dying since he was five years old, just fucking _waiting_ to die because what the hell is he going to do with whatever minimal period he’s got left? Sometimes the doctors tell him months, sometimes the doctors think he might get a year, sometimes it feels like he’s only got hours left, and he does all his fucking treatments and takes all his fucking meds and he’s still just _sick_ and even if he’s _not_ sick, his lungs are never going to work right. Mark can’t even _remember_ what it’s like to drag in a breath and feel anything but pain. Mark is just as angry with the world and with himself and with his useless fucking existence as any other cancer patient, but all it does is fill him with empathy. He just wants to make this kid _smile_. He wants a friend, and he wants to cheer up the new boy, who he sometimes hears crying softly when he walks past his room late at night, when Mark’s technically supposed to be in bed but none of the nurses will tell him off for it, because no one _really_ knows when he’s gonna go, so they kind of let him do whatever he wants with his numbered days.

Mark stares at the side of the new patient’s face, the only thing he can see with the way his head is angled towards the window again, and racks his brain for a good topic. He’s got nothing else on baseball, didn’t even really have enough to talk about it the first time, and he’s said more than he probably should’ve about each of the other patient’s he’s known. He thinks about talking about himself, but he’s not sure anyone would care, especially not this guy. He watches him for a long time, thinking, before deciding today just isn’t his day. Mark’s chemo was more stressful than usual, his body probably too weak for the treatment though they gave it to him anyway, leaving him heaving over the toilet for the entire afternoon afterwards. He was so exhausted he could barely think for two days after, and he’s not quite sure he slept it all of yet. There’s an ache so deep in his bones, Mark thinks it might be permanent, a new perk of cancer for him to endure for as long as he lives, and, even though he told himself he wouldn’t get upset when new boy still didn’t like him, he is, just a little.

Eventually, Mark says, softly, “I hope you have a nice day. Or, as nice a day you can have,” and feels so incredibly embarrassed that he just told a boy who lost his leg like, three weeks ago, to have a _nice day_ , he just gets up and drags his tank roughly behind him off the shag carpeting before moving as quickly as his body allows back into his room.

He doesn’t see wheelchair boy smiling behind him.

Mark does not _see_ the new patient for another five days, but he _hears_ him on the fourth, waking up from an afternoon nap to the boy down the hall screaming. It’s so _wrecked_ , so _desperate_ , it hurts Mark deep in his core, just the sound of it. He’s not saying anything, this time, but Mark _knows_. Half a minute in, Mimi appears at his door, tears staining her pale cheeks and her eyes wide and scared, and she whispers that her parents won’t be back for three hours. Mark shifts over in his bed, as much as he can with an IV deep in his left arm and his tubes a little tangled around his shoulder, and Mimi climbs up. Mark lets her press her head against his chest even though it kind of hurts and lets her squeeze his wrist even though he knows it will bruise. He places his arm carefully around her and covers her ear with his hand, drowning out the sound of a boy breaking down, and he tries not to listen. For all his effort, he still hears the screams, and he hears the shoes smacking into the ground as half the staff jogs to stop it, and he somehow hears a yell of “get me a sedative” over the screeching, and barely a minute later the sound cuts off abruptly.

Mimi slowly lifts her head, once she’s sure it’s not going to start again, and Mark drops his hand so she can turn to look at him. He smiles sadly at her, and grabs one of the tissues off the little table next to his bed to wipe the tears from her cheeks and the snot from under her nose.

“Can I stay here for a bit?” She asks, and Mark nods immediately and Mimi slumps back against him. Her head hits his collarbone, hard, but he bits back a whine at the pain, not wanting her to know she hurt him.

“Mark?” She speaks so quietly Mark almost thinks he imagined it, “Mark, is he going to be okay?”

Mark is not in the habit of lying, even to seven year old girls with brain cancer, so he says, “Eventually. Maybe.”

He’s a little surprised to see the new boy, out in his usual spot, slumped in his wheelchair as unhappily as he always is, the day right after his breakdown. Out of habit, Mark takes _his_ usual spot in the lounger next to the wheelchair, but this time, he doesn’t speak either. He’s not waiting for new boy to take initiative; he hasn’t really expected him too after that first moment, even though there was always that quiet hope that maybe he would. It strikes Mark, as soon as he’s sat down, that he’s not sure _why_ he did. There’s nothing he can say, he thinks, there’s nothing he can say to make it better. He cannot give this boy back his leg, and that seems to be the only thing he wants, and there is nothing anyone can say that will make his loss stop hurting, that will make him accept it.

Mark has felt like an annoyance, or maybe a burden, many times in his life. His parents have been pouring over hospital bills, doing fundraisers and asking for breaks and scrubbing together enough for treatments and stays throughout his entire life. He has seen his entire family through the crack in the door they didn’t realize they left huddle together in the hall outside his room and cry together, mourn him, fear what may happen to him, fear what will happen to them when he is finally gone. He’s not sure exactly which it is but, most likely, it’s a mix of them all. Cancer is a burden and little boys with cancer are even more so, and as Mark kept growing, so did his cancer, and so did the toll his life took on his family. He knows, still, that they don’t want him gone, that they still love him with everything they have, but he knows having a child with cancer is almost as exhausting as actually having the cancer is. Mark can’t even _begin_ to imagine but it must be like to raise a child knowing he will die, sooner than he should, and he knows that all of them, including him, are just holding their breath waiting for the day his time is really (finally) up.

Mark has felt like an annoyance, many times, and it’s still disheartening every time. He knows that wheelchair boy will probably scowl at the window, regardless of whether or not Mark is jabbering in his ear about something dumb and pointless, but if he didn’t want to be alone, he wouldn’t be alone. In the same way that the kids flock to Mark because they don’t want to be alone, and Mark flocks to the kids because _he_ doesn’t want to be alone, wheelchair boy sits on the edge and _chooses_ to be alone.

Obviously, this kid doesn’t _want_ Mark around. He wants his leg, and he wants to not have cancer, and he wants to not be stuck in a hospital with twelve other kids with cancer. Mark wants it too. Mark wants new lungs, and he wants to not have cancer, and he doesn’t want to step foot in another hospital for the rest of his life. Mimi wants her hair back and her cancer gone. Kai wants to play outside again. Anthony wants to go to school. Ashley wanted to be an actress, when she grew up, only she never even got to do the growing. There are all things they want that they cannot and will likely never have, so people tend to give them anything else they want. They try their best with the _big_ wish, the getting rid of cancer bit, but when they fail; they fulfill all the other little ones. They bring your favorite desserts and movies you want to see even though you might not live long enough for their official theater releases and people you’ve always wanted to see but probably wouldn’t get the chance to.

So, Mark cannot give wheelchair boy his leg, and he cannot get him out of the hospital, but he can give him this. He can leave him alone.

Two days later, Mark sees him, just as he usually sees him, only today he sees him from the back because wheelchair boy has stationed himself next to the long white couch instead. On impulse, he goes to flop down onto the couch, to start talking, but he catches himself at the last moment, and turns enough to continue down the hall towards his room.

There’s a week of purposeful avoidance, and then another week where it kind of happens on its own, Mark feeling particularly weak and opting to stay permanently in his bed for the entire eight days where he thinks he might actually die. His family visits a lot, especially after he quietly mentions that he thinks it might be time.

It happens a lot, actually. Mark feels worse and worse until a lot of people are pretty sure he is going to die and they gather miserably to wait and say goodbye and everyone jumps nervously every time his heart monitor ticks. The doctors let Mark’s parents sneak in some fast food and then some amount of days later,  when Mark is suddenly feeling relatively better,  there’s a lot of relief and the same seven jokes about how Mark is just constantly faking them out to get better food.

This is one of the longer periods, and there’s one day where his lungs are so terribly shitty they _almost_ take him to ICU, but it rights himself fast enough that Mark is allowed to stay in his usual room.

He sees wheelchair boy loitering outside his room on the seventh day, but Mark is too exhausted to think about _why_ , and if it’s because he wants to be friends, Mark wants to call out, he’s probably missed his chance. Never being friends is probably better than being friends for three weeks only for Mark to _die_.

He sees wheelchair boy again, six days after that night, when another of many miraculous semi-recoveries has occurred and Mark has been cleared as “probably not going to die in the next couple weeks, we don’t think,” and is sitting out on the couch in the communal area while most of the healthy(ish) patients have travelled down two floors to the hospital cafeteria to pick their own lunches.

Mark has one of the health magazines the nurses read during their downtime opened in his lap when he hears a quiet grunt and finds that the new boy is awkwardly maneuvering his wheelchair over the carpet to push in next to the couch, right next to where Mark is sitting. He doesn’t realize he’s been staring until wheelchair boy gets himself situated and looks up, raising his eyebrows questioningly. Immediately, Mark snaps his gaze back to the paper spread out on his thighs, forcing himself to ignore the new presence.

Mark is staring at his magazine even though he's not really reading the words on the page, his neck muscles tensed as he refrains from looking at the new boy. He doesn't even look when the new boy speaks to him for the first time, sounding rough and a little harsh, in a way that's less like he's trying to be aggressive and more like he just doesn't remember how to use his voice, saying, "Hey, cancer boy."

Mark would probably answer to 'cancer boy' as easily as he would his own name, even in a room full of patients, because there's no one else he could be talking to. In his peripherals, he can see Anthony lift his head lazily from where he's laying on the floor with a large sized picture book in his small hands, and he can hear Mimi and Xavier playing behind the couch, but it's definitely about him, and they all know. Mark's fragile frame is skin on bones with no muscle in between, bruises staining pale skin black and blue. His soft brown hair a little matted after he hasn't bothered to shower and missing thick clumps in several spots where the chemicals that are meant to kill his cancer fail and destroy his roots instead. The tank at his feet is attached to his face through a long tube that breathes oxygen into his body because his lungs cannot, and Mark _is_ cancer boy, and he has been cancer boy for twelve years, and he has been sick for more years than he hasn't, and he has spent more time in hospital beds than the one his parents have for him in his sparse room at home. Mark is cancer boy, and the entire world knows it just from a glance, but he still mumbles, without looking up, "That could be literally anyone here."

“Alright, _Mark_ ,” the boy gives him this strange, long suffering sigh, as though using the name Mark introduced himself with at least a month earlier is the worst thing he’s ever had to do, and Mark wonders why he ever wanted to be friends with such a _rude_ boy, even though a happy excitement is making his heart beat a little faster, “I’m Jackson.”

Mark smiles, a little, despite himself, and says, “Hey, Jackson,” glancing sideways at him. He waits for him to say something else, but Jackson doesn’t. He _does_ lean over the arm of his wheelchair into the edge of the couch, looking at the article that Mark still has open. Mark can just barely see, the way his head is angled, that Jackson smiles when he adjusts the magazine in his lap so they can both read it, and he waits until Jackson’s eyes stop scanning to page before he turns it.

It’s not exactly the stimulating conversation that Mark had been wishing for, but the quiet hope that it might come later is renewed.

When they reach the end of the article, Jackson sits up and Mark finally looks up at him.

“Do you want to read another? He asks, tentatively, hopefully.

Jackson looks Mark in the eyes, and he gives him a weak, little smile, and he says, “Yes.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> originally posted on jacksnwangs.tumblr.com


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